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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
The second instalment in Pekka Hiltunen's award-winning Studio series is an intelligent crime thriller pitting unlikely heroines against London's dark crime underworld. This sequel to the prize-winning Cold Courage, published by Hesperus in 2013, presents the second instalment in the Studio series by Pekka Hiltunen, celebrated Finnish crime author. Ultra-violent videos of murder and torture are being uploaded to the internet and when bodies start showing up on the streets of London, it begins to seem that the videos may be real and that a gruesome, exhibitionist killer is on the loose. The news catches the attention of Mari and Lia. Mari and Lia are two Finnish women living in London. Despite bonding over their shared expat identity, they have rather different backgrounds. While Lia is a graphic designer, Mari runs the mysterious 'Studio', a private crime fighting organisation that considers itself above the law. Taking matters into their own hands, they take on cases where the police have failed or are indifferent. Lia in time has slowly found her place in amongst this mysterious, morally motivated group of people who are not above employing underhand tactics to make sure that justice is served. Backed by high-tech gadgets and their team of fiercely loyal experts, the two women set about trying to stem the recent surge of violence and track down the murderer. But the stakes are high and Mari will have to risk much, even the lives of her companions, if she is to bring the perpetrator to justice.
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Black Noise
Pekka Hiltunen
Translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman
Contents
I
The Falling Tree
1.
Personal messages from the Devil.
The words had rung in Lia’s head all day.
When the dark videos appeared, they were like personal messages from the Devil.
Lia had noticed the short item about the videos in her newsfeed that morning when she arrived at work. Apparently someone had hacked the YouTube accounts of two English teenagers to upload some videos. The teenagers didn’t know one another, they lived in different parts of the country and they didn’t have the slightest idea why they were targeted or who had done it.
The strangest thing was that the clips were essentially blank – no picture, no audio. Just a black screen.
A reporter had interviewed one of the teens. He said the videos scared him. Staring at the soundless darkness had felt strange and funny at first, but when the nothingness just went on and on, it turned frightening. It was like getting coded messages or personal threats from the Devil, the boy had said. That was why he had contacted not only the YouTube admins but also the police and a newspaper. In the picture, the boy looked rather more pleased with the attention he was getting than racked with terror.
As a joke, the video stunt was dismal; as vandalism, ineffective; but still some significance seemed to lurk behind it.
The hacker had uploaded ten black videos under each teenager’s name, their lengths varying from a couple of minutes to nearly six. The videos had been taken down, and YouTube was currently investigating how the hack had occurred.
A marketing stunt perhaps? Lia thought.
But what kind of company would want that sort of publicity? And YouTube would be sure to take to court anyone who used hacking for advertising.
By the end of the day, Lia still couldn’t work out what the videos were about. She left the office early because she had another, less orthodox job to do before the evening.
Only once she was safely out of her magazine’s building on Fetter Lane did she pull on her gloves. They felt soft and protective, and signalled that something new was happening.
Lia wore gloves when she ran only on the chilliest winter days. She had a runner’s circulation and a Finn’s tolerance for cold. It was March, and London was already past the worst of its bleak spring, but today she still had to have gloves. With them on, she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.
She looked at the thin, white fabric. The touch of cotton on her skin made the change concrete. She had entered into a new phase of an undertaking which had required long, painstaking planning. Now it was really happening, and there was no turning back.
Lia had chosen the gloves with care. She had looked at the range of a few department stores and chosen a brand sold at several. Even if they left fibres behind, tracing them would be impossible.
She checked the envelopes one more time. There were five small ones, their addresses printed on labels, their postage stamps affixed with glue. There were three larger, thicker envelopes, prepared in similar fashion. Each envelope, label and stamp was different.
Resealing the plastic bags she was using to protect them, she placed the envelopes in her rucksack.
Lia had decided to run her round. She had checked the locations of the postboxes and post offices online and carefully planned her route so the envelopes would go through different sorting facilities and arrive on three different days. If someone ever investigated the letters, connecting them to each other would be difficult.
Starting from the City, running the route would take her a good three hours, but it felt like a good use of her time. Every last detail had to be perfect. A person’s whole life was at stake, and the Studio would also be affected.
My lovely, peculiar second home.
The Studio had given her day-to-day life a new dimension – caring for other people. You could commit to a job like that more than to other things. Lia wanted to do her day job at Level magazine well too, but for more selfish reasons, to be thought professional perhaps. At the Studio she was doing things for other people, so the tasks became emotionally important. Doing these jobs made her stronger as a person.
Running through Clerkenwell and Finsbury, she headed towards Islington, taking in one of her favourite streets on the way. On Essex Road her eyes took in every little launderette, shoe shop and undertaker’s, everything she had time to notice as she ran seemed to touch her lightly and spur her on as she passed.
The rucksack on her back grew lighter as she dropped each envelope in its appointed postbox. An almost melancholy feeling came over her. Off went all their meticulous hard work.
Whenever she stopped at a traffic light, she continued jogging slowly on the spot. People smiled, and Lia knew what they saw: just a young, blonde woman out for an evening run. Energy in motion, silent determination.
She thought of the envelopes she had posted and the routes they would travel. Each of them had a different destination but one and the same purpose.
In her mind she saw the letters’ journey. Postal workers fetching them, piling them onto moving conveyor belts, machines sorting them and sending them off in different directions. Then they would be delivered around London. The envelopes would travel in mail carts in buildings, making their way to secretaries’ desks and then to their intended recipients.
How long would they wait to be opened? And when they were opened, would they serve their purpose?
She dropped the last envelope near Primrose Hill. The round, red postbox swallowed it without a sound.
Home was a few kilometres away still. Accelerating, she felt her breathing speed up. Her step was light, so light she was almost floating in the air. As if she were breathing herself forward in the darkening evening.
When Lia arrived in Hampstead, she could recognise every hedgerow and garden gate. She knew exactly where and how to run so she wouldn’t need to slow down and could keep her heart rate steady at just the right level. On her street, Kidderpore Avenue, she finally slowed to a walk.
Right now she was powerful. An unusually long and winding run, just the right amount of exertion and the euphoria that accompanied it. The knowledge that the envelopes were on their way and that important things had been set in motion. Her warm body. The chill evening. The contrast produced a physical pleasure that tickled a special place somewhere in the depths of her brain.
Stopping at the small park next to her building, Lia started moving through her familiar post-run stretching routine. Next to the large, dignified statues in the park, her slender body was a fragile blade of grass. But Lia felt vigorous and confident, utterly alive.
That evening she didn’t notice the news that someone else had discovered their YouTube account had been hacked. The Devil had sent more of his messages. Another ten videos had been uploaded to a Scottish woman’s account, again showing nothing but black silence.
2.
As soon as Lia opened the door to the Studio, she heard quick, alert steps start towards her.
Tap, tap, tap. The well-groomed claws barely touched the floor. Kneeling, Lia accepted all the warmth a dog’s greeting could give.
Gro always knew when she arrived before all the others did, perhaps even a split second before the Studio’s surveillance systems. And Lia always wanted to greet Gro as thoroughly as the dog wanted to greet her.
‘You’re going to spoil her rotten,’ Mari used to say. ‘What kind of a guard dog is she going to be now?’ But Lia defended herself saying that she was only petting and wrestling with her, not feeding her too much or teaching her bad habits. In reality Mari was almost as taken with Gro as the rest of them.
Gro was Berg’s dog. Berg was the Studio’s carpenter and set designer, who could create almost anything for their operations: documents, identity cards, tools, objects. If necessary Berg could create a whole flat that looked like it really belonged to someone.
Sixty-something, Berg was half Swedish and had named his dog after the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. Berg wanted a woman’s name for his girl dog that exemplified Scandinavian values.
‘Gro doesn’t sound very dignified,’ Lia had said, teasing him. ‘It sounds more like a dog’s growl.’
‘But I know where the name comes from,’ Berg had said. ‘Since she has a name I respect, I never say it without that respect.’
Why not name her after a Swedish woman? Lia had asked. Greta Garbo? Ingrid Bergman?
‘No,’ Berg had said. ‘She looks like a Gro.’
In addition to serving as Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland had been a doctor, a party leader, director-general of the World Health Organisation and much more. Her black and white namesake also had a diverse background, but the breed she most closely resembled was a pointer. She was a stray Berg had adopted from an RSPCA shelter. After teaching her basic obedience and building her trust at home, he had gradually introduced her to the Studio’s team.
At the Studio Gro lived in the Den, which, despite its name, was an enormous space. That was where Berg worked, and it took time for Gro to learn not to chew on things she found on the shelves and desks and not to sniff at the cupboards in the kitchen area in the corner of the room.
But the dog worshipped Berg, and before long she learned her boundaries in the Den and the Studio at large. Eventually Berg even trained her to stay out of the kitchen.
Following a brief discussion, Mari had agreed to let Berg replace some of the Studio’s interior doors with lightweight swinging ones so Gro could move from one room to another by pushing doors open with her muzzle.
‘It’ll be easier for her to guard the place this way,’ Berg argued, although they all knew the Studio didn’t actually need any more guarding. The CCTV cameras, motion sensors in the floors and computer surveillance were quite sufficient.
Two places were off limits to Gro. One was Rico’s large office, dominated by dozens of computer racks and other delicate devices.
‘Gro Harlem is welcome in my home any time but not near these cables and instruments,’ the Brazilian IT genius said. Calling the dog by her full name amused him, what with its entirely non-Scandinavian reference.
Gro was also never allowed in Mari’s office. Lia wasn’t entirely sure why, whether it was meant as a sign of deference to Mari’s position at the head of the Studio’s little team or whether she just wanted to be left in peace, but Gro accepted this rule quickly too. Even though Mari’s door was often open, she never tried to go in.
‘She recognises natural leadership, who the pack leader is,’ Mari once observed to Lia, who was slightly irked to have to admit to herself that Mari was right.
Even though Gro had been a stray with some trust issues, she settled into life at the Studio significantly faster than Lia had herself. For the dog it took a couple of months, for Lia it had taken more than a year.
The Studio was a place the like of which Lia had never imagined existed, and she couldn’t talk about it to anyone. It was a large, eight-room space occupying nearly an entire floor of an office building in London’s Bankside, and the jobs they did were always interesting and unusual. Mari always chose projects that would move the world in the direction she wanted. Sometimes it was behind-the-scenes charity work, but occasionally the jobs were stranger and more frightening.
For Lia the Studio was like a second home or office where the lines between friendship and work overlapped and intertwined. By day she worked as a graphic designer for a biweekly magazine named Level. In the evenings and at the weekends, she spent most of her time on Studio business.
Mari was her best friend, an exceptional woman who had suddenly appeared in her life after nearly six years living in London. Their shared Finnish background united them, along with an ability to drink with abandon when the opportunity presented itself and a feeling that they could get along in the world on their own but had to be thankful for true allies. Berg and Rico worked for Mari, but like Lia and everyone else at the Studio, they were also Mari’s confidants. The team’s two other members were Brits: Maggie Thornton, an actor in her fifties, who did background research and played characters in their operations as necessary, and Paddy Moore, a security specialist and private investigator.
Lia didn’t know how many of the Studio’s jobs required specific detective skills or led to illegal acts. Although she and Mari had become quite close, Mari remained tight-lipped about much of what her group had done over the years.
Lia stepped into Mari’s office and Gro returned to the Den, back to her master.
‘How did it go?’ Mari asked.
‘Well,’ Lia said, taking her usual place on one of the large sofas in Mari’s office.
She knew such a brief report wouldn’t be sufficient for Mari, who always wanted to know everything down to the tiniest detail. Lia had learned that it usually paid to tell Mari everything, because even the smallest-seeming bits of information could turn out to be worth their weight in gold once they had percolated for a while in Mari’s brain.
So Lia recounted the letters’ progress over the previous day. Of the five thin envelopes, three had been delivered today to the editorial offices of large newspapers. The rest would arrive tomorrow. The three larger, thicker envelopes were still en route, one of them on its way to the editor-in-chief of a magazine and two to the offices of TV channels.
They had considered the number and manner of delivery of the letters for a long time, weighing the likelihood that each editor would make the contents public and which media outlets it was most important to reach. They debated whether to approach the newspapers by email or using more old-fashioned means. They decided on letters because these days those always made more of an impression on their recipients than emails, and concealing the true identity of the person sending a letter was easier.
Each of the five thin envelopes contained a letter to the editor. They all dealt with the same topic, although they were each written differently and sent using a different name.
Mari had written them with Lia’s help. From her day job at Level, Lia knew a little about what kinds of opinion pieces newspapers and magazines wanted to publish, but Mari had only needed a little help polishing them. Making sure each had a unique authorial voice was critical so the letters could never be connected to each other.
Together with the Studio’s other employees, they had also created contact information and an online history for the writers. If the newspapers checked up on them before the letters were published, the enquiries would come to the Studio. There Maggie and Rico were prepared to play the appropriate parts over the phone or via email.
Newspapers rarely checked opinion letter writers’ information, Lia knew. Mostly only when politically significant issues were in play. The editorial offices of the larger, more prestigious papers did look online and in the telephone directories to verify whether the senders existed and seemed like normal, respectable people. But that seldom led to even a phone call.
In the thicker envelopes were larger packets of information, and creating them had required more of the Studio. They had needed to set up an entire fan site. It was very small, built so one person could operate it, but in addition to a website it also required content with a range of dates and references to it elsewhere online. Berg and Rico had handled that.
All of the preparations had taken a little more than a week, in which time quite a bit of other planning also went on. That still amazed Lia. She had been working with the Studio for more than a year but still struggled to keep up with the rest of the group.
‘What now?’ she asked Mari. ‘Just wait for a couple of days?’
Mari nodded. Now they waited until the letters served their purpose. Then the next stage would begin.
Lia had learned at the Studio that Mari’s plans worked. And although waiting felt hard, she knew it was easy for Mari. She would use this time to plan too, always something new. For her, the world was a place that could be changed – you just had to choose what you wanted to change.
Fortunately Lia knew what to do while they waited.
‘I’m going for a jog,’ she announced and then left to make two creatures happy for the next two hours: the dog and herself.
3.
They waited for Craig Cole a few blocks from his flat so he wouldn’t think them pushy.
Cole walked briskly. He had hidden his red, puffy face behind dark glasses. The swelling of his face was not a result of drink, Lia and Mari knew. This was a man who now cried every day. Sometimes several times a day, without the dignity or self-control that had previously been a foregone conclusion in his life up to this point. Until the catastrophe struck.
Craig Cole had become a man who cried every day when a fourteen-year-old girl named Bryony Wade called his live radio show and announced before an audience of millions that Cole had made advances on her.
Of course the staff at Radio 2 screened that call, just like all the other calls that had been made to the show that day three weeks ago. An assistant producer talked with Bryony Wade before connecting her to the broadcast. She was supposed to request a Justin Bieber song and chat with Cole about her friends’ favourite websites. Instead she dropped a bombshell. She said that her parents had encouraged her to ring and tell him that the whole family intended to go to the police.
‘You dirty old man,’ Bryony Wade said live on the air. ‘You should be in prison.’
Cole’s twenty-six years in radio did not save him. He lost crucial time by thinking that the call had to be some sort of sick joke. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen.
‘Come now, Bryony,’ he said. ‘We’ve never even met. I think it’s best we end the fun right here.’
‘Last night you shoved your hand under my jumper and touched my tits,’ Bryony said. ‘You promised me money if you could grope me. You dirty old man. I’m only fourteen.’
The producers cut off the call, but 1.6 million listeners had already heard one of the most popular radio personalities in Britain knocked speechless. All that came over the airwaves was the muted music that was supposed to play in the background of each call. It continued to play for nearly thirty seconds before Cole had finished screaming at the production team behind the glass and returned to the microphone. All that was missing was the audience hearing his screams.
Within ten minutes the incident started spreading online, replaying over and over the clip of a fourteen-year-old nobody accusing a fifty-two-year-old radio star of groping her breasts and saying he should be locked up in jail.
The tabloids took about an hour to find Bryony Wade and get her on the phone. She told them she and her parents were heading to the police station to file a complaint. And thus, the catastrophe was complete.
They never filed a criminal report. Bryony and her parents never went to the police station. They started giving interviews through the window of the family car and then at home.
Perhaps the Wade family had never intended to go to the police at all, Craig Cole had thought. Their target might have been something else entirely – such as the national media attention.
Cole quickly realised what an easy target he was. It turned out that he had been at the same event with Bryony Wade the previous day, and he had even been seen alone with her for a moment in the same place. They had both been participating in a fundraiser for the Elizabeth Simms School in Newham – Craig Cole as a celebrity guest whose presence would draw in potential donors, Bryony Wade as one of the school’s numerous volunteers.
As Cole waited in the dressing room for his turn on stage, Bryony was also seen backstage, on her way to the dressing room and then coming out a little later. Cole didn’t know what the girl had been doing in the room, but he did know he had never seen Bryony, let alone touched her.
‘Why didn’t you report the groping to the teachers?’ the reporters asked Bryony.
‘I was in shock. I’m only fourteen,’ she replied.
I’m only fourteen. The girl repeated that over and over, and it had its effect, as if her age confirmed her accusation, practically proving it was true. Every headline, every interview in which Bryony called attention to her fourteen-year-old innocence cut a little piece from Cole’s reputation.
‘I’ve never met this girl. I would never do something like that,’ Cole repeatedly told the reporters. ‘I have a long, happy marriage, and I’ve been working in radio for twenty-six years. I can’t understand why any young girl would even want to allege something so grotesque.’
His confusion and the girl’s age was enough to ensure a spot on the front page of every tabloid in the nation. Inside, their interviews were often printed side-by-side, which dismayed Cole even further: as if the girl’s absurd story could be taken seriously. In the Sun, a four-page special report related Cole’s distinguished career, while the Wade family received six pages.
Gropegate the papers called it. The word left no room for doubt, talking about it as if it had actually happened. When Cole saw the phrase for the first time, he knew he was sunk.
Cole cried for the first time three days after the catastrophic phone call. He cried over how exhausted he was, that he no longer had the energy to declare his innocence to even one more person and that a twenty-six-year career didn’t seem to protect him from anything.
The more serious news outlets gave the case a few columns, in which they also stated that Bryony had not yet gone to the police.
But the gossip rags couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Day after day Gropegate continued as they assembled expert commentary on how common sexual harassment was and dug up old friends of the Wade family who swore that Bryony was a normal, quiet girl without any reason to make claims of this sort unless they were well founded.
Cole asked himself every day what the ‘foundations’ could have been. Why had this teenage girl and her family pulled such a dirty stunt?
There were many possible answers. Perhaps she had been infatuated with him. That happened sometimes, Cole knew from his fan mail. Perhaps his presence and sense of humour on air had made him a target, inexplicably important somehow. Perhaps the fact that the listener never sees the speaker only intensifies the attachment, allowing them to fall in love with their own idea of the person behind the voice, with their own emotions when listening to him. A pleasant voice could be a powerful draw.
Or maybe the family just wanted to become famous. Maybe they thought they would get money from it. Maybe they wanted all of this fallout and something more. A feeling that they were somehow important.
When Mari and Lia went to meet Craig Cole, they knew they would find him near his home. Cole didn’t have anywhere to be during the day any more.
The network had shelved his show after five days of sensation. The listening figures had actually gone up because of the scandal, but so many prank calls were coming in accusing Cole of being a paedophile and child rapist that screening for normal callers was nearly impossible. And even the normal callers usually just had one thing on their minds, how terrible what had happened to Cole was. You couldn’t make an entertainment programme out of pity calls. The producers had encouraged Cole to file a criminal complaint against the girl, but he wouldn’t agree to that or to the BBC doing it on his behalf. So Cole had been forced to leave the station.
They stood face to face, two women with expectant looks and Craig Cole steeling himself for the wave of outrage that had to be coming. Cole lived on Radnor Walk in Chelsea, which was dominated by the restrained atmosphere that often accompanied wealth, but perhaps the aggression against him had reached closer to his doorstep than he knew.
‘We don’t know each other, but I have a matter to discuss with you,’ the woman with darker hair said.
‘Yes, you’re right, I don’t believe we do know each other,’ Cole said, trying to keep his voice friendly.
So many people had approached him this way. People who wanted to stand in judgement on the street, in the shop, in the pub, in the lobby of the radio station. The worst had been a man who attacked him in Currys, shouting that people like him didn’t have any right to be walking around free. When the salespeople intervened to save Cole, he fled immediately, without buying anything, avoiding the stares and wondering how long it would take for someone to pull out their camera phone and put him back in the headlines: Cole Beaten Up in Currys.
These women seemed civilised enough, but their purposeful bearing didn’t bode well. He had to assume that any complete stranger walking up to him on the street might be trouble. Perhaps they were mothers and some pervert had messed with their children and now he was going to get a taste of their rage.
‘My name is Mari Rautee,’ the dark-haired woman calmly said.
‘Yes?’ Craig said, raising his eyebrows at the foreign name as he looked around for an escape route.
‘We can get you back your reputation.’
After an hour of conversation, the impossible was starting to feel possible again.
Not probable, Craig thought, not something you’d dare put much money on, but it was starting to seem at least faintly conceivable.
‘The most important thing is that you stay absolutely calm and stick to the logic of your story,’ the Finnish woman said.
‘My story?’ Craig repeated.
‘Yes.’
The woman’s gaze was sharp, almost piercing, like her entire attitude. The other woman, the blonde one, mostly kept quiet, but the dark-haired one named Mari was more than enough of a challenge. If they hadn’t spent the past hour talking as they had, Craig Cole would have avoided that gaze. He couldn’t have borne it in his present condition.
‘Does it feel strange for you that I call it a story?’ Mari asked.
‘Yes, it does. This whole thing is strange.’
But Cole had to think about it that way, Mari argued. He had his own life, a good life that had been interrupted because he had been thrown into a strange story. Someone had invented this lie, and now that meant the actual reality of Cole’s life wasn’t enough. They had to create another narrative. They had to attract attention to another story that was just as powerful and interesting as the one to which Cole had fallen victim.
‘The truth isn’t enough right now. The truth needs some help.’
The woman with the strange name spoke well, Cole thought.
When she had introduced herself on the street and offered to help him with damage control, Cole’s first reaction was to try to get away. PR consultants weren’t going to do him any good, and any PR firm sniffing at his carcass wasn’t going to want anything but his money.
But the woman had said they were prepared to work for him pro bono. Cole stopped and listened. After listening he asked the women into his home.
The house was large and silent. Cole’s wife, Gill, had been on personal leave for a week due to Gropegate, but now she was back at work. Cole put the kettle on as they sat in the kitchen.
‘Did you see the morning paper? The letters page?’ Mari indicated The Times lying on the table.
‘No,’ Cole said.
He hadn’t been able to read the letters pages for days. His name came up too often.
‘It might be worth a look,’ Mari said, opening the paper to the right page and handing it to Cole.
Reputation is the most important means of communication people have these days, the long letter began. Not a social media platform, not a mobile device, but rather the overall picture that forms of each of us through all different channels. Because reputation comes from so many sources, you might think that ruining it quickly and almost by accident would be difficult. But it is not. It is actually very easy. Too easy. And this appears to be what happened to Craig Cole.
The letter described how single, chance occurrences could destroy the reputation of a public figure, possibly for entirely the wrong reasons. Cole looked at the letter-writer’s name: Jane Woolstone, a communications consultant from London.
In the surge of emotion, Cole could barely speak. Mari and Lia waited quietly while he reread the letter.
As she looked on, Lia’s eyes fell on another page of the newspaper lying open on the table. There was a short, one-column story: strange black videos had appeared online again under a hacked identity, this time on MySpace. Again ten videos like last time. Apparently whoever was behind the stunt knew how to cover their tracks in such a way that even the largest web services in the world couldn’t track them down.
The letter to the editor in The Times almost brought Cole to tears again.
‘I never would have believed anyone would write something like this about me any more,’ Cole said.
‘There are other people who think this way too,’ Mari said. ‘We have to give them a voice.’
Cole listened in confusion as the dark-haired woman with the strange name pitched her PR campaign. It was the strangest thing Cole had ever heard.
When the woman reached the conclusion of her presentation, Cole thought for a moment. Then he asked, ‘Why would you do all that?’
Mari smiled. ‘I like the truth. And sometimes a chance comes along for me to help it.’
4.
All five of the Studio’s letters were published at almost exactly the time Lia and Mari expected. Only the Daily Mail took a day longer than planned.
The five letters to the editor were the first positive things written about Craig Cole in weeks. Each of them presented its own arguments for why the Gropegate accusations should be considered suspect. And all of them suggested that Cole had been defamed.
Each letter sounded reasonable and measured. Mari and Lia had polished the language knowing that there was no sense trying to suppress the frenzy against Cole with passion. Instead, it had to be turned by quiet conversation, by creating conditions favourable for his defence.
Of course the writer who had defended Cole in The Times, Jane Woolstone, didn’t exist. The Studio had created her, just like the other four writers.
Rico had doubted the plan. ‘Do people read the letter pages much any more since so much happens online? Do letters like this have any real impact?’
They weren’t looking for any dramatic change from five letters though, Mari explained. They were just an opening, a way to lower the temperature of the conversation. And they would give Cole himself a little hope for the future.
Given her line of work, Lia was able to assure the others that people still read the letter pages. Everyone in newspapers and magazines knew it, and reader surveys had confirmed it. At Level, they didn’t publish very many messages or letters from readers, but those they did were still among the most popular content.
And the main audience for the letters wasn’t just the general public, Mari said. By writing in Cole’s defence to the five big papers, they would also create the impression in the rest of the media that the wave of anger against the DJ might be subsiding.
At the same time as the letters were coming out, the larger envelopes reached their destinations at three selected editorial offices. In each was a scrapbook, every one different, containing copies of magazine articles and newspaper headlines spanning Craig Cole’s career.
Cole Opens New Prize Gala.
Radio Star Relaxes at Pub Quiz Contest.
The fact that the Studio could only find warm or neutral news stories about him over the years was a testament to Cole’s irreproachability. He had participated in hundreds of events in his work and free time – he had had a lifetime of opportunities for dalliances or ruffling feathers.
The public record created an unstintingly positive picture of him, and the books of clippings showed that. They had his quips to the paparazzi at film openings, his speeches at charity events, even a story about the only crime he was known to have ever committed: he had been caught trying to smuggle a piece of jewellery made from a rare turtle shell from Morocco back to England. Even that entanglement turned out positive once it came out that he had done it at his daughter’s request since she was so smitten with the piece.
Lia was relieved when Cole’s past turned out spotless. When Mari initially announced at the Studio that she was going to try to help Cole, Lia had been floored.
‘We need to intervene. Cole didn’t do it,’ Mari said the day Gropegate hit the news.
‘What do you mean he didn’t do it? How can you be so sure?’ Lia asked curiously.
‘He just didn’t.’
Lia often had a hard time accepting the absoluteness of Mari’s opinions, but she had seen her friend’s special ability in action before: all Mari had to do was look at a person to read their innermost thoughts. Sometimes Mari’s gift felt almost supernatural, although she claimed it didn’t have anything to do with clairvoyance or anything else otherworldly. Mari was a psychologist by training and a researcher by disposition, and she didn’t believe in the supernatural. She took a very practical attitude towards the jobs she took on at the Studio, devoting herself to them nearly round the clock. Part of that was because she seemed to perceive so much more about people than the rest of them.
They had a lot in common. They were roughly the same age – Lia twenty-nine, Mari thirty-three – and both had left their home country to look for work and something new.
Lia had told Mari nearly everything about her background except why in her early twenties she had suddenly wanted to get as far away from Helsinki as she could. She had been in a relationship that had turned nightmarish. Lia didn’t know whether Mari could see that unpleasant experience in her. Sometimes she was convinced Mari didn’t know but other times it seemed obvious that she did. She could never be sure with Mari.
The operation began in earnest when the network shelved Craig Cole’s show. As the first order of business, Mari asked Lia, Rico and Maggie to help her investigate both him and Bryony Wade. Lia focused on newspaper articles in the digital archives, Rico on web sources and Maggie looked into official records and conducted interviews. Every couple of days they reported back to Mari and each other.
Cole’s past was squeaky clean, but so was Bryony’s. Nothing suspicious about her or her family turned up, and the accusations against Cole were the first time the family had appeared in the public eye.
‘The girl is lying,’ Mari said after watching Bryony appear in a TV interview and listening several times to her call to Cole’s radio programme. Something had made the girl direct her anger against Cole, but the reason was a mystery.
Craig Cole’s feeble attempts at self-defence were strange too, Mari said to Lia one night. He hadn’t even filed a police complaint about her accusations, instead just waiting apathetically for the truth to come out.
‘This whole thing has gone too far,’ Mari said. ‘No innocent person should have to endure something like this.’
She also wanted to get involved because she detested the exaggerated fuss some newspapers made about sexual harassment. For decades the issue had been virtually taboo in the UK, as elsewhere, but in recent years more and more cases had come to light where someone accused a famous person of sexual abuse. Entertainers, artists, long-established politicians. The revelations had shocked the nation time and time again. When the incidents kept coming, people had started learning to approach the issue in a new way, breaking the systematic silence. Brushing it aside was a thing of the past.
But these accusations were a dangerous temptation for the media. Witch hunt was often an understatement, and sometimes innocents were harmed. Serious, aggravated sexual harassment occurred every day, and sensational stories only made it harder to do anything about the real problem.
Lia agreed completely, but she still had a theory about why the Craig Cole case touched Mari so deeply. Perhaps Mari was partially trying to make up for the Arthur Fried incident. A year earlier the Studio had taken on two jobs, the ones that had drawn Lia into the team. While investigating the activities of far-right politician Arthur Fried, they had also begun looking into the death of a woman brutally slain in London.
Participating in those jobs changed Lia’s life. She had never believed she could do anything like that or even thought about grim crimes in detail. But after meeting Mari, her ideas of what was possible for a normal person had broadened considerably.
However, they had come to loggerheads about what Mari had done to Fried. It had taken time for Lia to get over their disagreement.
But now here she was, at the Studio. Their little band had become very dear to her, as had their office building’s expansive views of the Thames and the old industrial blocks of Bankside.
Mari and she rarely talked about the events of a year ago and especially avoided talking about the Arthur Fried incident. Lia knew it was better to let things lie.
Maybe Cole is Mari’s way of balancing something out. Help one man regain his reputation because she made the wrong decision about another.
But what do I know? Mari probably doesn’t regret her decisions one little bit. Maybe that’s only my wishful thinking.
5.
The first phone call the Studio arranged in Cole’s defence went through to a live broadcast on Radio 2 at 8.52 a.m.
‘And who do we have on the line now?’ asked the woman hosting the morning talk show, her voice so soft and friendly you could have packaged and sold it to spread on toast.
‘Dave here,’ the caller replied.
‘Dave, you’re calling from Ipswich?’
‘You got it!’
‘Goodness gracious, we certainly are perky out in Ipswich this morning, aren’t we? So what’s your take on the question of the day? Should the licence be changed to reflect how many TV broadcasts a person really watches?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly satisfied with the current system. But what I’m not satisfied with is that last night when we met, you started groping me.’
The presenter’s silence only lasted about ten seconds.
‘OK, Dave…’
‘It’s not OK,’ Dave interrupted. ‘People need to hear this. It’s the easiest thing in the world to ring a radio show and throw out any old bollocks.’
‘OK, you’ve had your fun.’
‘Don’t OK me. I’m twenty-eight years old. You’re forty-seven, and I’m twenty-eight.’
From the presenter’s voice, it was obvious she was losing her temper.
‘Repeating ages like that isn’t funny. You’re just trying to allude to Bryony Wade,’ the woman said.
‘The purpose isn’t to be funny. The purpose is to prove something.’
‘Great, you’ve proved something.’
‘Thank you!’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dave from Ipswich who wanted to talk about something other than the question of the day and who –’
‘And who is twenty-eight years old,’ Dave interrupted.
‘Very funny,’ the presenter said, disconnecting the call and continuing her programme.
The Studio staff made four similar calls during the day, each to a different radio programme. In addition to Dave, age twenty-eight, there were Lisa, thirty-two, Terry, sixty-seven, and Shane, forty-four. Adult callers who repeated their own age several times, claimed the host of the programme had harassed them and talked about how easy it was to get on a phone-in show and say absolutely anything.
In each case the presenter stumbled for a moment at first before recognising the connection to the Bryony Wade case and ending the conversation as quickly as possible. The calls attracted a lot of attention anyway. Subsequent callers wanted to comment too, and soon Craig Cole had become the main topic of discussions on other programmes as well.
That afternoon a news editor for the BBC rang Cole and asked whether he knew about these surprising phone calls. ‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ Cole replied. ‘I don’t know the people calling, but it is awfully nice that people want to get involved. It gives you the feeling that people really care.’
That was the answer Cole and Mari had agreed upon.
The Studio’s letters to the editor about Craig Cole did their job, quickly spawning online chatter, and Lia noticed it was getting the reporters at Level talking too. The topic of Cole even came up in their editorial meeting, although they decided not to do a story because they already had other crime pieces in the pipeline. That was a small disappointment for Lia, but, on the other hand, she was pleased that Level didn’t grasp at scandals just because the headlines would sell magazines.
The fake Cole scrapbooks had an even more profound effect. The intent was to create a specific impression: a collection of clippings collected lovingly over the course of years, a book an admirer might piece together about a revered, trusted person. All three of the media outlets which received them took notice. So unusual were they that they were treated to a thorough review. Yes, people smiled at them, but they also started thinking.
The first media outlet that took action was Sky News. Calling the number that accompanied the package, one of their background reporters said that the host of their Sunrise programme, Eamonn Holmes, wanted to do an hour-long special broadcast about the life and career of Craig Cole. Maggie answered at the Studio playing the part of the book’s sender, someone who maintained a Cole fan site.
Mari was over the moon.
‘I knew the scrapbook would work!’
Lia watched her enthusiasm with amusement.
She thinks she’s always right. Which she is, nearly always.
What she didn’t understand was why Mari had wanted to meet Craig Cole herself, face to face. As a general rule, Mari avoided direct contact with the targets of the Studio’s work, and Cole was a national radio personality, so being seen with him could arouse unwanted curiosity.
‘He needs me,’ Mari explained.
Cole had fallen from so high that his emotional reserves were almost exhausted. All of his energy was going into getting through each day, keeping himself together. In order to accept someone’s help, Cole would have to trust them completely.
An acquaintance with a person like Cole also had its good points, Lia thought. The network of important people he knew had to be large even if it hadn’t held up when he had needed it.
Mari chose her friends and associates at the Studio carefully. Thanks to all the relationships she had developed over the years, Mari had so much money she never had to skimp on expenses in their work. And Lia could never stop admiring the talents of the people Mari assembled around her.
Berg made a particular impression on Lia while they were searching for articles about Cole for the scrapbooks. When their haul from the specialist shops that sell old newspapers had proved too small, Berg had the idea of looking for real Cole admirers and convincing them to sell parts of their collections. Lia went along when Berg went to meet one woman.
A twenty-six-year-old paraplegic, she spent her days lying in a nursing home. Thinking the woman might feel uncomfortable with a strange man visiting, Berg asked Lia to accompany him. But Lia didn’t have to do anything during the visit, just watch as Berg deftly handled everything. He didn’t offer the woman pity for her condition or talk to her with exaggerated warmth. He was just disarmingly sincere.
Sitting at her bedside, they talked about Craig Cole for quite some time. The woman had taken a shine to Cole years earlier, initially because of the sound of his voice. Now after the Gropegate scandal, she didn’t know what to think of Cole but hesitated to throw away the magazine stories she had collected.
‘I don’t want all of them, just a part,’ Berg said.
The woman went silent and stared at Berg in confusion.
‘I’ve always liked all sorts of TV and radio people,’ Berg said. ‘Like some of the news anchors or Stephen Fry – it doesn’t matter what he’s talking about or what show he’s on. When a person does something like that well, it just brings people joy, you know? And it’s totally different from liking a singer. They can give you opinions, life experience. It’s a little like having a friend who knows loads about all sorts of things and is always trying something new. They just make the world a little more fun and open.’
Lia saw on the woman’s face that those words had earned Berg a stack of clippings about Craig Cole.
On the way back from the nursing home, Berg drove Lia back to Hampstead. Once he had turned the Studio’s grey van around and driven off with Gro staring out the window wagging her tail, Lia couldn’t help thinking that Berg had just as much warmth and natural wisdom as any of the famous people they had just been talking about.
Berg is one of those people who always makes everyone feel better.
But unlike some famous performer, Berg’s wisdom wasn’t to be shared with everyone. It belonged to the Studio, and to Gro.
That thought led to another, more melancholy idea. Had Berg adopted the dog because he felt lonely? Lia knew a little bit about everyone at the studio. Maggie had one marriage behind her and was currently seeing someone. Rico kept personal things private but was active on the London night scene. Between Mari and Paddy there was a clear, mutual interest, but so far neither of them had made a move – and both of them engaged in other occasional relationships. During her years in London, Lia had felt a gnawing loneliness that led her to seek variety by picking up men in bars, but now she was living a sort of intermediate phase in which the most important things to her were work and the people at the Studio.
But, as far as she knew, Berg had never been married or had children and didn’t seem to be looking for that. Besides Mari, Berg was the only person at the Studio who had ever talked to her much about relationships – actually he had asked her about the subject very directly once.
‘What’s a young woman like you waiting around for?’ Berg asked her one night in the Den kitchen when no one else was around.
‘What do you mean?’ Lia asked evasively, guessing what he was getting at.
‘Why don’t you have a man?’ Berg continued.
Coming out of anyone else’s mouth it would have sounded rude. But Berg lived alone himself, and his attitude was so open and accepting that Lia knew he was only interested in a straightforward answer to the question.
‘I guess I’m just going through a phase. Like I’m between two places in my life,’ Lia said. ‘I’ll find someone who’s right for me. Someday.’
‘Good,’ Berg said.
He hadn’t laboured the topic by making jokes or offering advice. That made Lia like him even more. They could talk about complicated, even painful things. Berg might be lonely sometimes, but even in his solitude there was an unusual peace.
We are all a little like Gro, lucky that a person like that happened to cross our paths. We were all lucky to end up at the Studio.
You need one or two really good strokes of luck to protect you from the bad things that always come.
6.
Lia’s day at Level was busy. After putting off her work to go to a series of meetings, she had to get her layouts done quickly. The hour hand was already creeping up on three o’clock, and in situations like this Lia usually shut everything else out of her mind, but something in one of her colleague’s voices made her turn and look.
‘Dear God,’ said Sam, the reporter who sat at the desk next to her.
Staring at his computer screen, Sam was as white as a sheet, with his fists pressed to his mouth.
Lia rolled her chair over next to him. On the display was a video. There was no sound because Sam had headphones plugged in.
The images in the video changed at a breathtaking pace. Something was happening, so confused and violent that it was hard to comprehend.
A person lying on the ground was being kicked. Lia wasn’t sure whether the victim was a man or a woman, the images shifted too quickly. The feet doing the kicking looked like a man’s, but being sure of the number of kickers was impossible.
Kicking legs surrounded the person on the ground.
Dear God indeed.
Occasionally the kicker would take a step back to get more force. Flying into the victim, the kicks sent the poor person sprawling into unnatural positions.
The video was shot and edited in such a way that the kicks became the main focus, sometimes also moving into slow motion. It was the world’s most disgusting work of videography, starring a pair of feet mutilating a helpless person.
‘That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Lia managed to say.
Sam shoved his chair back, pulling his headphones out. When their cord came out of the computer too, Lia realised that the video didn’t have any sound.
Sam was speechless. He was so shocked that he had to stand up and walk around a bit.
‘How did they make it?’ Lia asked. ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’
She looked at the video and hated it. As the kicks flew home again and again, watching became too repulsive.
Reaching over to the keyboard, Sam stopped the video. On screen froze an image of the feet mid-motion and the victim, a dark, lifeless mass against a grey background.
Lia stared at the frozen frame on the computer and then turned to look at Sam. Seeing his expression, she realised what he was thinking.
What if those images aren’t staged?
Listening to Sam and the others in the office following the story as it progressed made it difficult for Lia to concentrate on her design work.
The editorial staff at Level was a male-dominated group that was hard to faze, but the video made them all shake their heads. Most of them couldn’t watch it all the way through, even when it was still online. According to the news broadcasts, the aggressive kicking video had been uploaded by an unknown hacker to a woman’s YouTube account. By the time YouTube removed the video, it had been copied to countless other servers and continued spreading.
‘Rather gruesome for a viral stunt,’ said the editor-in-chief of Level, Timothy Phelps.
What was the purpose of the kicking video? That was the question that began to crop up on the Internet discussion boards. And did it have anything to do with the earlier, black videos?
It would take a really sick person to want to spread these images around, Lia thought. There was nothing artistic about the video. It was all too ugly, too frighteningly real.
If it was meant as a protest against violence in films or video games, it completely overshot its mark. All it did was make viewers sick.
By the time Lia arrived at the Studio, it was almost seven. This time both Gro and Rico greeted her in the hall.
‘You’ve seen the video, right?’ Rico asked. ‘Did you hear the news though?’
‘What news?’
‘The police think it really happened,’ Rico said.
Not waiting around for Lia’s response, he walked back to his office carrying his custom-built tablet. Lia quickly patted Gro and then followed Rico with the dog obediently backing off at the door to Rico’s kingdom.
Rico’s office in the Studio was a large space mainly dominated by the dim flashing lights of workstations and server racks. Rico always wanted the light set optimally for his machines and the work he was doing. There were dozens of custom-modified computers in the room and shelves of supplies he used to assemble other devices.
Rico showed Lia the ITV news broadcast. It had just been released, and while Lia watched it, Rico set his tablet in its cradle. He called it the ‘Topo’, a Portuguese word that meant ‘top’ but also ‘done!’ when used as an interjection. The little machine was Rico’s pride and joy, the subject of constant upgrading and tweaks. Somehow he had managed to pack more processing power into it than a normal desktop computer. He never went anywhere without it.
Video Violence, read the headline over the picture. The image was familiar to Lia – this was the thing she and countless other people around Britain had been staring at in shock for the past few hours.
Cruel kicks at a person lying helpless on the ground.
Lia watched the news report in silence. The newsreader spoke about the outrage the video had sparked, its removal from YouTube and the statement from the police. The authorities suspected that the video might depict an actual assault. The images had been cut so little was visible of the people doing the kicking or the location where it occurred, but, according to experts, the footage seemed real.
The video had been uploaded by the username Dina81. That account belonged to a woman in her thirties of Algerian descent living in Bristol. Her only other videos were four clips from rock festivals recorded on her phone. The woman was devastated that the video had showed up online under her name and, according to the police, she didn’t know how it had happened.
Once Lia finished watching the broadcast, Rico moved over next to her. He hadn’t wanted to see it again.
‘Couldn’t it still be staged? Could it be fake and still look so real?’ Lia asked.
Rico knew a lot about making videos and manipulating images and sound.
‘If that was staged, the people who did it are some of the best in the world,’ he said.
Lia sensed the anxiety in Rico’s voice.
This video has us all shaken up. The people at Level, here at the Studio, everywhere.
Soon the whole world is going to know about it. What a revolting, sick thing. A visual virus.
They held the meeting in Mari’s office. Everyone from the Studio except Paddy Moore was present.
Their work on Craig Cole’s behalf had borne fruit. The TV stations had aired their shows about the Cole incident, attracting widespread attention. The newspapers wrote about the programmes before they aired, and the broadcasts themselves had high ratings. The Times even dedicated one of its lead stories to a discussion as to whether it was too easy to stigmatise a person in public without any basis in reality.
‘Then comes the best news,’ Maggie said.
Cole had received a job offer from Smooth Radio, one of the biggest independents in the country. The station was launching a new programme, and Cole would be one of the celebrity guest hosts who would work with the regular presenter and run the show himself once a week for the next month.
Berg whistled while Lia and Rico clapped. Mari nodded, looking satisfied, but she still had more information to add.
‘Unfortunately Craig doesn’t plan to take the job,’ she said.
Mari had just talked with Cole about it on the phone, and couldn’t convince him to change his mind.
‘Why on earth not?’ Lia asked.
This news was a disappointment since they had expended so much effort to get Cole back his reputation. That job would be that much easier if he returned to the work he was known for.
‘I think I understand where he’s coming from,’ Mari said.
Cole had several reasons for his decision. His reputation still wasn’t clean, and in such a visible position he would still be forced over and over again to defend himself. He had also already been working for twenty-six years – he would have to stop doing daily shows before long anyway, and he had started to get used to that idea.
‘That’s absurd,’ Maggie said. ‘We worked for weeks to patch up his reputation, and then right when it starts getting back a little shine, he doesn’t want it after all? Or at least not the same status he had before?’
‘This happens sometimes,’ Mari said. ‘But we’ll keep in touch with Craig. This isn’t over yet.’
Did Mari have some kind of plan for him? Lia asked.
‘Well, let’s just say I have some ideas brewing,’ Mari said. ‘But now we need to give him some space for a while. Falling from stardom was a big change. All of this takes time.’
‘I think we can be pretty satisfied,’ Lia said once the meeting ended.
Mari smiled. Berg gave a thumbs-up and hurried down the corridor to call Gro for her evening walk.
Rico didn’t say anything, and Lia could see that he wasn’t listening any more. Instead he was looking at news and commentary about the kicking videos on the Topo. More just kept coming.
